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Google sells Motorola unit to Lenovo for $2.9B
PC maker Lenovo, which has struggled for smartphone
success outside China, gets an established global brand, while Google unloads a
burden on its balance sheet and a source of tension.
Roger Cheng by Roger Cheng January 29, 2014 1:22 PM PST
Google is unloading Motorola Mobility onto Chinese PC
maker Lenovo.
Google confirmed on its site that it has sold Motorola
for $2.91 billion, consisting of $660 million in cash and $750 million in
Lenovo shares, with the remaining $1.5 billion paid in the form of a three-year
promissory note. Reuters earlier reported on the deal.
Lenovo gets the Motorola brand, as well as its portfolio
of devices, including the Moto X and Moto G. In addition, it will also receive
more than 2,000 patent assets, while Google will retain control of a majority
of the patents it originally obtained when it acquired Motorola several years
ago.
A deal instantly gives Lenovo, which has a thriving
smartphone business in China…

Why Is Facebook's
App Asking To Read Your Text Messages?
Hint: It might not be to see what you're sexting.
By Chris
Gayomali
Over the last month or so, a few keen-eyed Android users
may have been startled by some peculiar permission requests when they tried to
update their Facebook app. One request asks to "read your text messages
(SMS or MMS)."
That's not
exactly the kind of language users are likely to find reassuring, especially
after recent allegations that Facebook has been scanning private messages
within the social network. So, Facebook is currently on a PR offensive to calm
user fears. "We realize that some of these permissions sound scary,"
writes Facebook. "So we’d like to provide more info about how we use them
... If you add a phone number to your account, this allows us to confirm your
phone number automatically by finding the confirmation code that we send via
text message."
Make of those assurances what you will, and you can re…

US looks at ways to prevent spying on its spying
Associated Press
By STEPHEN BRAUN 4 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government is looking at ways to
prevent anyone from spying on its own surveillance of Americans' phone records.
As the Obama administration considers shifting the
collection of those records from the National Security Agency to requiring that
they be stored at phone companies or elsewhere, it's
quietly funding research to prevent phone company employees or eavesdroppers
from seeing whom the U.S.
is spying on, The Associated Press has learned.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has
paid at least five research teams across the country to develop a system for
high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records kept outside the
government's possession. The project
is among several ideas that would allow the government to discontinue storing
Americans' phone records, but still
search them as needed.
Under the research, U.S. data mini…

Jan 27, 6:48 PM EST
Gov't,
Internet companies reach deal on disclosure
By JESSE J. HOLLAND Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government and leading Internet
companies on Monday announced a compromise that will allow those companies to
reveal more information about how often they are ordered to turn over customer
information to the government in national security investigations.
The Justice Department reached agreements with Google
Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. that would
resolve those companies' legal
challenges before the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court. The companies had
asked judges to allow them to disclose data on national security orders the
companies have received under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The delivery of customer information to the government
from Internet companies has been under examination in the United States
following leaks about National Security Agency surveillance by former NSA
system…

Google to offer FREE taxis to restaurants, casinos and
more (so long as you promise to spend money when you arrive)
According to the patent, journeys would be paid for by
advertisers
Google would use location data to show ads on phones, or
bus stops
Business would consider whether potential profits
outweighs the costs
In the future, journeys could be carried out by Google's
self-driving cars
By VICTORIA WOOLLASTON
PUBLISHED: 06:50 EST, 24 January 2014 | UPDATED: 13:41
EST, 24 January 2014
Next time you fancy a romantic meal for two, or a trip to
the cinema, you could be taken there in a free taxi, courtesy of Google.
According to a recently-awarded patent, the journeys
would be paid for by advertisers hoping to encourage more people to use their
businesses.
The system would run on Google’s existing AdWords
software, and in the future, these journeys could even be carried out by
Google's self-driving cars.
The ad-powered taxi service was detailed in a patent
originally filed…

NSA also serves economic interests: Snowden interview
AFP – 21 hrs ago
Berlin (AFP) - The US National Security Agency (NSA)
sometimes uses data it collects for economic purposes, intelligence leaker
Edward Snowden reveals in an extract of an interview with a German television
chain to be broadcast Sunday.
"If there is information, for example on Siemens,
which is in the national interest, but has nothing to do with national
security, they will still use this information," said Snowden, according
to the German translation of the interview on public television ARD.
The interview was carried out by a journalist for NDR, a
regional chain belonging to the broadcaster that has analysed secret documents
that Snowden leaked to journalists.
Under top secrecy, the chain this week in Moscow filmed
the first interview with Snowden since he left Hong Kong in 2013 to seek refuge
in Russia.
The 30-minute interview will be broadcast Sunday at 2200
GMT, with initial extracts to be released …

Blimplike surveillance craft set to deploy over Maryland
heighten privacy concerns
By Craig Timberg, Published: January 22
They will look like two giant white blimps floating high
above I-95 in Maryland, perhaps en route to a football game somewhere along the
bustling Eastern Seaboard. But their mission will have nothing to do with
sports and everything to do with war.
The aerostats — that is the term for lighter-than-air
craft that are tethered to the ground — are to be set aloft on Army-owned land
about 45 miles northeast of Washington, near Aberdeen Proving Ground, for a
three-year test slated to start in October. From a vantage of 10,000 feet, they
will cast a vast radar net from Raleigh, N.C., to Boston and out to Lake Erie,
with the goal of detecting cruise missiles or enemy aircraft so they could be
intercepted before reaching the capital.
Aerostats deployed by the military at U.S. bases in Iraq
and Afghanistan typically carried powerful surveillance cameras as well, to
track …

Bill Gates Says Government Spying Isn’t Always Bad
BY AMERICA WITH JORGE RAMOS - 01/21/2014, 12:00PM /
Updated 01/21/2014, 04:31PM
Bill Gates has strong opinions when it comes to world
poverty, but the tech titan-turned-philanthropist takes the middle ground on
government spying.
Speaking with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos in an interview set to
air on Tuesday, Gates said the U.S. needs to strike a balance between
protecting citizens’ privacy and identifying national security threats.
“At the end of the day...we want to stop terrorism, we
want to see if someone’s talking about nuclear weapons, or bioterrorism or
various bad things,” Gates said. “So it’s not as though government surveillance
is absolutely bad in all cases…I think it’s a valuable debate and I do think we
can balance the two goals.”
Gates spoke to Fusion in conjunction with the release of
the annual letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In the letter,
Gates pronounced that by 2035, no nation would be as poor as th…

Sen. Leahy on NSA spying: We need to stop government from
controlling American people [VIDEO]
10:30 AM 01/19/2014
Sen. Patrick Leahy says the American people are at risk
of being controlled by their government due to the expansive surveillance
powers of the National Security Agency.
Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” the Vermont Democrat and
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee told host Chris Wallace that the
nation’s lawmakers must act to return control of the government to the people.
“I think that we are going to maintain our ability to
protect the United States,” Leahy began. “That’s extremely important.”
“The concern everybody has is allowing our government to
have such a reach into your private life, my private life, and everybody
else’s, that we are, we have the government controlling us instead of us
controlling the government.”
“And that’s what both Republicans and Democrats are
joined together on the Hill to try to change,” Leahy concluded.
Earlier in the program, Leahy …

Why Facebook wants to be more like Twitter Hint: Twitter
spreads news a lot faster
By Chris Gayomali | January 16, 2014
The big news in the tech world today is that Facebook is
rolling out a newly redesigned "Trending" feature. Pretty soon, users
will see a ticker on the right side of their News Feed that will spotlight what
chatty Facebookers are yapping about.
If the feature looks familiar, it should be. It's
basically Twitter's trending topics painted Facebook blue, plus a few minor
differences.
"The list is personalized, including topics based on
things you're interested in and what is trending across Facebook overall,"
explains engineering manager Chris Struhar in a blog post.
"Each topic is accompanied by a headline that
briefly explains why it is trending. You can click on any headline to see the
most interesting posts from your friends or pages that are talking about that
particular topic."
Click on the word "Golden Globes&quot…

NSA collects millions of text messages daily in
'untargeted' global sweep
• NSA extracts location, contacts and financial
transactions
• 'Dishfire' program sweeps up 'pretty much everything it
can'
• GCHQ using database to search metadata from UK numbers
• Dishfire presentation on text message collection – key
extracts
James Ball in New York theguardian.com, Thursday 16 January 2014 13.55 EST
The National Security Agency has collected almost 200
million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data
including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to
top-secret documents.
The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages –
including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the
Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made
use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untarg…

Apple to Refund App Store Purchases Made Without Parental
Consent
By EDWARD WYATT and BRIAN X. CHEN JAN. 15, 2014
An agreement between federal regulators and Apple may
make parents wince a little less at the sight of their children staring at an
iPhone.
The Federal Trade Commission said on Wednesday that Apple
had agreed to better ensure parental approval of purchases from the company’s
App Store. In addition, Apple will pay at least $32.5 million in refunds to
customers whose children made purchases without adequate parental consent.
Apple settled a class-action lawsuit last year over
unauthorized purchases within apps — transactions that could be made within 15
minutes of buying an app from Apple without having to provide an additional
password or authorization. As part of the settlement, Apple offered refunds to
consumers who were affected. The company said in an email to employees on
Wednesday that it had received 37,000 claims.
But the F.T.C. said that similar activity had conti…

Meet Blackphone, A Highly Secure Device Perfect For
Paranoid Sext Fiends
Bonus: It doesn't support Path.
By Jordan Valinsky 1/15 10:41am
It’s no Lumia, but this sounds impressive: A Madrid-based
communications firm said it has created the first fully secure and encrypted
smartphone that lets users send and receive calls (and texts) without being
vulnerable to hackers or snoopers.
Dubbed the Blackphone, its sleek all-black case and
touchscreen makes it look like it fell out of the pocket of James Bond’s
blazer. The Android-based device uses an operating system named PrivatOS that
promises highly secure privacy protection that would make the NSA wince. The
yet-to-be-priced phone can transfer encrypted files and features a video chat
option.
The phone is carrier independent so we’re holding out for
that T-Mobile upgrade. Of course, just because the company proclaims its immune
to hacking, doesn’t mean some programmer isn’t figuring out a way to break into
it. Also, it’s unclear if t…

N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers
By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKERJAN. 14, 2014
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has implanted
software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United
States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital
highway for launching cyberattacks.
While most of the software is inserted by gaining access
to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret
technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they
are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer
experts and American officials.
The technology, which the agency has used since at least
2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from
tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers.
In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that
intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.
The…